It’s still in beta (as most Google applications are) but now Google has an application that will sycn your iPhone. This concept strikes me as strange, but I guess with this you could ditch iTunes and use something like Songbird and Google to sync everything on your iPhone.
It uses a licenseable Microsoft protocol for the synchronization. Why didn’t Google just write their own? I mean how can they crush Microsoft if they are using their product?
Upon further examination, I think (at least for now) you will still need iTunes. I haven’t tried the Google sync and don’t know that I will. I currently use the Mobile Me sync to keep everything up to date real-time.
Anyone try this yet? If so, what’s the scoop?
Sid Boswell Blog Apple, Google, iPhone, Microsoft
My brother-in-law had an old PowerBook G4 laying around. He said it had a bad hard drive and it was just collecting dust. He sent it to me to mess around with as I figured I could at least make it usable.
Specs:
I was able to replace the Hard Drive rather easily by following the instructions at iFixit. I wanted to do a compare of speeds of doing normal tasks so I tried to install Leopard, but after the DVD spinning for a few hours I learned that the minimum requirements for Leopard is 512 MB RAM.
Read more…
Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux, PowerPC, Ubuntu
So the weather sucked and I didn’t feel like playing any online games today. I decided to do some updates, upgrades, and play around for a bit.
The first order of business was to update my Mac and iPhone and they were pretty easy and benign (and the latest iPhone upgrade rocks). I applied all the updates to several Windoze computers or Virtual Machines, and performed all the updates for the various flavors of Linux running around the house. No problems with the basic updates. Everything went as planned.
Read more…
Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, iPhone, Linux, Mythbuntu, MythTV, Ubuntu, Windoze, Wordpress
It seems that Apple’s cloud computing push teknology for some reason decided that only Mac OS X and Windoze would be able to use their nifty cloud computing push iPhone teknology. In other words, they have either left the open source community hanging or they intentionally pulled the plug on compatibility across platforms. Try to browse to the www.me.com from any Linux PC (unless you are running something under WINE) and you’ll get a big fat, “it ain’t like that.” This includes eeePCs, the $199 gOS netbooks sold at GoodEmployeeBenefitsmart and anybody who decides not to back down to the evil empire or use an iPhone. For all their embracing of open source, Apple seems to have left the open source community hanging.
What I’m getting at is that MobileMe does not support Linux. I’m pretty sure it isn’t a compatibility or a features issue as if you spoof your browser using a well known FireFox extension (user agent switcher) you can get it to work, but why bother? What is Apple saying to the non-Apple Hardware, non-Microsoft crowd out there?
I have an iPhone and a MacBookPro for work, but I’m pissed that I can’t have access to my address book from my eeePC or from any of my other Linux boxes.
Sid Boswell Blog, Life, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Vista, Windoze
Wordpress
So, I decided that I would move my blog from iWeb to WordPress. One of the reasons I decided to do this is it will give me the capability of hosting more blogs and even doing content based blogging. I also was dumping my iWeb folder onto my Ubuntu box and therefore didn’t have the ability to allow comments on my blog. I will still keep my personal Web site based on iWeb (at least for now), and will work on integrating them together if at all possible.
I installed WordPress on my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) installation. I initially used the package from the ubuntu repositories (apt-get) but after my initial spin, I decided to go with the most recent tarball from WordPress itself. Installation was a breeze and consisted of:
- unpacking the tarball (tar -xvf filename)
- changing the ownership of the wordpress directory to allow the Apache user write privileges (chown -R user:group wordpress)
- creating a wordpress user and database in phpMyAdmin
- browsing to the wordpress directory
Read more…
Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Wordpress
Ubuntu Logo
I’ve migrated just about everything from my iMac to Elvis (my Ubuntu Linux server running on my old Pentium desktop). If there are any gaping holes in any of my information please let me know (i.e. if there is anything that did not get migrated).
Now that I am (mostly) migrated, I’ll start to play around with some other LAMP based services for fun (forums, blogs, etc.).
I’ll usually post my updates to this blog or the news page on the wiki.
Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux
Ubuntu
Now that I’m just about fully converted off of my old PC, I’ve decided to have some fun with it. Some folks wonder how I can consider this fun, but to each his own.
I’ve decided to try to live without Windoze. I’m sure that I”ll have to run it for some things (Stacie really likes the buttons on the front of the scanner that make “copies”), but most of those things can be done in a virtual machine. I won’t delete my XP partitions just yet, but will attempt to use native XP (as opposed to XP in a VM) as little as possible.
I started with downloading some of the live CDs/DVDs for some Linux distributions to figure out which ones I like. I tried Mandriva, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE. I really liked KDE in Kubuntu, but am more comfortable with GNOME and it seems more stable and a bit faster. I narrowed my search down to CentOS, SUSE, and Ubuntu.
Next, I decided to actually install the distributions that I liked and take a whorl at configuring them and getting things set up like I like them (LAMP + Parallels + a few other odds and ends). Here is what I discovered…. Read more…
Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Windoze
Camel
So I’m finally getting around to playing around with my server and updating my blog. There are a few of reasons for this, the primary one being that I am currently unemployed, and the secondary one being that the Comcast/Adelphia transfer for my market (sys/prin) has actually happened. Now that I’m on the Comcast network, I can actually serve up web pages from my own computer, rather than have it hosted somewhere. Continue to check back as I have started writing some code in Perl and have installed a MySql database on my iMac. I’ll be playing around with various things to create a fun site for me to get some practice with and for others to browse and leave comments.
Sid Boswell Blog, Life Apple
Take me to your leader.
So, I’m still not sure if anyone bothers to read any of this stuff, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s just something to keep me occupied and sort of fun.
I’ve had a nasty cold for a few days and still can’t seem to shake the cough and chest congestion.
Sid Boswell Blog, Life Apple, Photo Booth
